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Labor Conditions on Haciendas
in Porfirian Mexico:
Some Trends and Tendencies
FRIEDRICH KATZ~
not perform any labor services but only paid the owner a fixed sum
or a share of their harvest. 13
Tenants varied, from those renting large amounts of land14 or a
whole rancho to those using only small plots. Some had land of their
own outside the hacienda in addition to the land they rented. Some
tenants or sharecroppers worked their own land, while others hired
laborers. Some hired hacienda laborers at harvest time. Some were
required to sell their produce to the hacienda, others could do so on
the open market. 15
The variety of arrangements among sharecroppers was also very
great, but perhaps not quite as large as among tenants. Some hacenda-
dos were mainly interested in the part of the harvest the sharecroppers.
turned over, while others considered their labor most important. Some
sharecroppers lived permanently on the hacienda, others in neighbor-
ing villages. Among them were subsistence farmers ekeing out a bare
existence and others who had a certain surplus to dispose of. Among
smaller tenants and sharecroppers arrangements generally were for
a short time only and the hacendado felt free to revoke or change
them at any time. Neither the Spanish state nor the Mexican state
which followed it did much to regulate such arrangements.
While it is not clear why some hacendados preferred tenantry and
others sharecropping, some tendencies do emerge. Brading has shown
that in the Baj:lo the replacement of sharecropping by tenantry ar-
rangements was linked to an expanding market on the one hand and
to an increase in labor supply on the other. 16 An expanding market
made it possible for tenants to pay their rents in money while the
availability of labor made it less and less important for the haciendas
to have sharecroppers whom they could use as temporary laborers
during harvest time. 17
Existing evidence suggests that debt peonage was of limited im-
portance at the end of the colonial period and the beginning of the
nineteenth century. In the Valley of Mexico, Charles Gibson has found
that "in late colonial times debt peonage affected fewer than half the
workers on haciendas and the large majority of these owed debts
13. Ibid., pp. 32-33; Bazant, "Peones, Arrendatarios y Medieros," pp. 34-40;
Badura, "Biograf!a de Ia Hacienda," pp. 104-105.
14. Bazant, "Peones, Arrendatarios y Medieros," 42ff.
15. Ibid., pp. 36-42.
16. Brading, "Agricultural Production," p. 34.
17. In the Bajfo this change did not represent a concession to the laborers but
was considered by them as an additional burden which they so strongly resisted
that some were removed by force from the hacienda, ibid., pp. 33-34
LABOR CONDITIONS ON HACIENDAS 7
equal to three weeks' wages or less." The situation seems to have
18
on fourteen Valley estates the average debt was 355 pesos. With
monthly wages generally set at 3.2 pesos, this represents roughly
eleven months work. 24 While in the North the size of the debt was
automatically linked to coercive measures by the hacienda, Taylor sees
the problem as more complex in Oaxaca.
Although debt peonage in Oaxaca clearly had coercive over-
tones, the large debts may actually indicate that Oaxaca rural
laborers had a strong bargaining position. Certainly, 355 pesos
was much more than was necessary to perpetuate a laborer's
indebtedness. 25
In Yucatan a clearly coercive system prevailed. Most of the labor-
ers on the haciendas were permanent resident peons called luneros. In
return for a piece of land, and above all, for water flowing from sources
the hacienda controlled, peons were required to work without com-
pensation every Monday. These laborers were generally bound by
debts to the hacienda. 26 While during the struggle for Mexican inde-
pendence some efforts were made to abolish debt peonage, this insti-
tution was reinforced by a law promulgated in Yucatan in 1843. This
law made it illegal to hire laborers who had left an hacienda without
paying their debts and required local authorities to return indebted
peons to their haciendas. 27
What were the causes of these regional differences? In the case of
the North, there is every indication that low population density led
to a scarcity of labor which made the hacendados utilize all means
at their disposal to force laborers to remain on their haciendas. In
the cases of Oaxaca and Yucatan population density was much higher
than in the .North. Not the absolute lack of laborers, but a greater
scarcity of free labor than in central Mexico might have played a key
role here. Why the scarcity? While this problem requires more re-
search, two factors should be considered: a relatively larger number
of landowning Indian villages than in the central plateau, and more
powerful Indian caciques competing with the Spanish hacendados
for Indian laborers. 28
one hand and by peones acasillados on the other. Most of the peasant
uprisings which took place in Mexico in the eighteenth, nineteenth,
and twentieth centuries stemmed from inhabitants of free Indian vil-
lages trying to keep or regain their lands or to protest against high
taxes. There were some movements, however, which took place on
haciendas. In the few cases in which the social origins of the partici-
pants have been traced, they were not peones acasillados but mainly
tenants. The rising on the Hacienda de Bocas in 178o, was in the main,
the work of tenants, and only one peon acasillado seems to have par-
ticipated.32 When the inhabitants of Capura, a village near Pachuca,
rose against the government in 186g, they were joined by many of the
tenants on adjacent haciendas. 33 On the other hand, in those cases
where hacendados organized retainers to fight against Indian villages,
it was peones acasillados and cowboys on whom they counted. 34 In
1870 the Hacienda of San Miguel used its peones acasillados to repel
an attack by neighboring villagers who had lost their lands to the
hacienda. 35 The first manifestation of the Revolution of 1910 in the
village of Naranja in Michoacan was an attack by local villagers, not
against the federal authorities, but against the peones acasillados of a
neighboring hacienda which had taken away their lands. 36
32. Bazant, "Peones, Arrendatarios y Medieros," pp. 48-49. Bazant found sim-
ilar tendencies in another uprising which took place in San Luis Potosi in the
nineteenth century. "La sublevaci6n de Ia Sierra Gorda que propugn6 por reducir
o abolir las rentas, pero no por aumentar el jornal del pe6n, parece confirmar Ia
informaci6n de Bocas en el sentido de que los arrendatarios, y no los peones perma-
nentes, se hallaban en una situaci6n crftica, por Io menos en algunas partes del
Estado de San Luis Potosi" ( Bazant, p. 42). This seems to have been the case
during one of Mexico's most important Indian revolts, the "guerra de castas" in
Yucatan in the nineteenth century. According to Moises Gonzalez Navarro, "Ia
guerra fue iniciada e impulsada por los mayas de Ia frontera, los huits, y por
quienes s6lo recientemente habian dejado de pertencer a esa categoria. Los mayas
occidentales, en cambio, por largo tiempo acostumbrados al peonaje acabaron por
unirse a los blancos ... .' These Indians "hablan transferido su lealtad del pueblo
a Ia hacienda" (Gonzalez Navarro, Raza y tierra, p. 87).
33 Jesus Silva Herzog El agrarismo mexicano y la reforma agraria (Mexico,
1959), PP 97-98.
34 Gonzalez Navarro, Raza y tierra, p. 87.
35 Coatsworth, "The Impact," pp. 245-249.
36. Paul Friedrich, Agrarian Revolt in a Mexican Village (Englewood Cliffs,
New Jersey, 1970), p. 51. In spite of these tendencies the passivity of hacienda
peons should not be exaggerated. In some cases resident peons did develop social
movements of their own, but unlike the inhabitant of communal villages, in most
cases these peons limited their action to appeals to government authorities. Fran<;ois
Chevalier describes the efforts of inhabitants of haciendas in northern Mexico as
well as Guanajuato to secure the independent status of pueblos for themselves at
the end of the eighteenth and during the first half of the nineteenth centuries
( Fran<;ois Chevalier, "The North Mexican Hacienda: Eighteenth and Nineteenth
Century," The New World Looks at Its History (Austin, Texas, 1963), pp. 101-
LABOR CONDITIONS ON HACIENDAS 11
106). Ewald, "Versuche zur Anderung," found similar attempts being made in
the Puebla-Tlaxcala region. Most appear to have been unsuccessful (pp. 245-247),
but in a few cases, such efforts by resident peons achieved their aims. In the last
years of the Spanish colonial administration the resident peons of the Hacienda de
San Miguel obtained the approval of the Spanish authorities to found an autono-
mous pueblo named San Sebasti{m Buena vista on hacienda lands ( pp. 246-247).
A few very rare instances are recorded in the nineteenth century in which acasil-
lados seem to have taken part in armed uprisings. In 1869 Chavez Lopez a peasant
revolutionary operating between Chalco and Puebla, called on the acasillados to
rise. He accused the hacendados of having "subjected us to the greatest possible
abuses; they have established a system of exploitation by which means we are
denied the simplest pleasures of life." He seems to have had a measure of success
and more than 1,500 men joined him in his uprising. Though there is no evidence
as to the type of peasants who joined his movement the fact that he appealed to
the acasillados indicates that he at least expected to gain their support (John M.
Hart, "Mexican Agrarian Precursors," The Americas, 29:2[0ctober 1972],131-
150).
37 Unpublished studies on Mexican haciendas durin~ the Porf!riato are also
rare. An important exception is Edith Boorstein Couturier, 'Hacienda of Hueyapan:
The History of a Mexican Social and Economic Institution, 1550-1940," 'Ph.D.
Diss., Columbia University, 1965, which describes in great detail the history and
organization of an hacienda near Pachuca.
12 HAHR I FEBRUARY I FRIEDRICH KATZ
40. The most important speeches on the subject in the Mexican congress as
well as relevant articles and brochures were published by Jesus Silva Herzog in
La cuesti6n de la tierra, 4 vols. (Mexico, 1960).
41. Oscar Lewis, Life in a Mexican Village: Tepoztlcin Restudied (Urbana,
1951); Robert Redfield, Tepoztldn, A Mexican Village (Chicago, 1930); Luis
Gonzalez y Gonzalez, Pueblo en vilo; microhistoria de San Jose de Gracia (Mexico,
1968).
42. Friedrich, Agrarian Revolt.
43 I would like to express my thanks to Professor Arturo Warman and the re-
search team he heads at the Universidad lbero Americana for the information they
have supplied me concerning social and economic conditions on the Hacienda of
Santa Ana Tenango in Morelos.
HAHR I FEBRUARY I FRIEDRICH KATZ
The South
As we have seen, in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth cen-
turies labor conditions in Mexico showed two broad patterns: that of
the South and the North on the one hand and that of the Center on
the other. But in the Porfirian era labor on Mexican haciendas evolved
in three different ways in the tropical South, the central plateau and
highlands, and in the North of the country.
The large-scale increase of demand for products of the tropical
lowlands, embracing essentially the states of Yucatan, Tabasco, Chiapas,
parts of Oaxaca and Veracruz, led to a corresponding increase in
production there. From 1877 to 1910 production of rubber, coffee,
46. See Lauro Viadas, "El problema de la pequefia propiedad" in Jesus Silva
Herzog, La cuesti6n de la tierra (Mexico, 1g6o), p. 117. Kaerger, Landwirtschaft
und Kolonisation, II, 650.
47 Gonzalo Camara Zavala, Reseiia hist6rica de la industria henequera de
Yucatan (Merida, 1936), p. 59 Deutsches Zentralarchiv, Potsdam Nr. 1571;
Deutsche Gesandtschaft in China. Emigration nach Mexiko, 1909-1910.
16 HAHR I FEBRUARY I FRIEDRICH KATZ
who were virtually prisoners and had been sent there by the
government. Admiral Fletcher and I saw this remarkable situa-
tion in the twentieth century of men being scattered through
the corn fields in little groups of eight or ten accompanied by
a driver, a cacique, an Indian from the coast, a great big burly
fellow, with a couple of revolvers strapped to a belt, and a black
snake that would measure eight or ten feet, right after the
group that were digging, and then at the farther end of the
road a man with a sawed-off shotgun. These men were put out
in the morning, were worked under these overseers in that
to the master, but practically this binds him hand and foot." 55 Later,
because of massive increases in the production of sisal at the end of
the nineteenth and beginning of the twentieth centuries, the area of
maize production was sharply reduced in Yucatan from 15,ooo hectares
in 1845 to 4,500 hectares in 1907.06 One of the clearest consequences
of this was a large scale reduction of the lands put at the disposal of
the hacienda laborers. In many cases, only a few privileged retainers
still had access to hacienda lands; the great majority of acasillados
became completely dependent upon food supplied by the haciendas. 57
This loss of access to land eliminated one of the greatest differences
between debt peonage and slavery.
The tendency for the acasillados to decline into slave-like condi-
tions expressed itself in another way. In the classic system of debt
peonage, when a peon wanted to transfer from one hacienda to an-
other, his new master had to assume his debt. When an hacienda was
sold, these debts were added up. In Yucatan this practice, though
existent in theory, had been superseded by another. The peon's value
was decided by a market price independent of the peon's debt but
very much dependent on general market conditions, especially on the
pri.::e of sisal. Around 1895 the price of a peon was quoted at between
two and three hundred pesos. In 1900, with a sharp rise in the price
of sisal, the price of a worker rose to between 1,500 and 3,ooo pesos. 58
After the crisis of "1907, it fell back to 400 pesos. 59
In the early years of the Diaz period, ;until the turn of the cen-
tury, the conditions of these acasillados we're, nevertheless, far better
than those of the deportees or contract workers. The hacendados re-
tained some minimum of mutual obligations in relations with their
acasillados. In 1901 Karl Kaerger reported that
the legal means to bind criados to an hacienda consists in an
advance payment which in this state means that a worker who
leaves can be returned by force by the police to the hacienda.
These advance payments are generally made when a young man
born on the hacienda reaches the age of 18 or zo and marries.
and then in a lower tone: 'they work us until we are ready to fall, then they throw
us away to get strong again. If they worked the full-timers like they work us they
would die.'" (Turner, Barbarous Mexico, p. 23).
67. Kaerger, Landwirtschaft und Kolonisation, II, 543
68. Thompson, The People of Mexico, pp. 326-327.
6g. Kaerger, Landwirtschaft und Kolonisation, II, 535
70. Ramirez Garrido, "La Esclavitud," p. 36.
71. Turner, Barbarous Mexico, p. 59
72. Thompson, The People of Mexico, pp. 327-328. Turner, Barbarous Mexico,
p.6L
22 HAHR I FEBRUARY I FRIEDRICH KATZ
of laborers from their villages. In this way, seasonal workers from the
Huasteca region of Veracruz were brought to Yucatecan sisal planta-
tions. The contractors who brought, supervised, and returned the
laborers to their native villages received 6 percent of their wages from
the hacienda. 73 The hold that these contractors had on their fellow
villagers is not clear. Were they local merchants or caciques whose
authority rested on traditional bases, or were they government offi-
cials? Research needs to be done on this.
On the tobacco plantations of San Andres Tuxtla land was leased
out to tenants called habilitados who had to tend a large number of
tobacco plants and hire laborers on their own account. On the coffee
fincas of the Soconusco district every coffee finca had a recruiter and
supervisor called habilitador with at least two helpers whose duty
it was to recruit laborers in the highlands, bring them to the planta-
tion and recapture them if they escaped. The importance attached
to these habilitadores is shown by the relatively high wages they were
paid. They received 100 pesos a month, the same as a chief of police
in Mexico City. The wages of their helpers varied from seventeen to
twenty pesos a month. 7 4
How effective was this whole system of supervision in maintaining
the new slavery and the forms of forced labor, in preventing escape
and curbing resistance? There is little doubt that the system was most
effective in controlling and restraining the deportees and contract
workers. There are scarcely any reports of revolts or uprisings by
these groups. They were in a completely alien environment, which
made escape difficult and resistance rare and unlikely. Frequently very
heterogeneous groups, such as Yaquis and convicts from Mexico City,
were placed together and this also made concerted action difficult.
Peons of local origin, who were less closely supervised and knew
conditions well, had a better chance of escaping and sometimes tried
to do so. An independent Maya state in Quintana Roo gave asylum to
escapees from the rest of Yucatan, but after the Mexican army sub-
jugated this state in 1902, the last avenue of escape was closed. Many
never tried to flee. As their families had lived near or on the hacienda
for centuries and there were no industrial centers nearby, escape was
not considered a serious possibility. 75
The cuadrilla workers, temporary forced laborers, most frequently
tried to escape. In the Soconusco region, about 30 percent of the con-
tract workers escaped before their contract expired. Since they re-
73 Kaerger, Landwirtschaft ttnd Kolonisation, II, 491.
74 Ibid., 544 Walter F. Weyl: Labor Conditions in Mexico, p. 63.
75 Reed, The Caste War, p. 48. Gonzalez Navarro, Raza y tierra, p. 87.
LABOR CONDITIONS ON HACIENDAS 23
turned sooner or later to their own villages, it was not difficult either
for the fefe politico or the policeman sent by the hacienda to return
them to the plantation. 76
These coercive mechanisms facilitated a phenomenal increase in
the production of tropical goods during the Porfirian period. The
beneficiaries of this plantation system, outside of Yucatan, were mainly
foreigners: German coffee planters in Chiapas, Spanish and Cuban
tobacco producers in the Valle Nacional, American rubber planters in
the Tehuantepec area. In Yucatan the sisal hacendados were all Mexi-
can. The principal beneficiaries of the increase in sisal production up
to 1910, however, were not the producers but the International Har-
vester Company.77
Why did conditions akin to slavery appear in southern Mexico at
a time when in most other parts of Latin America legal slavery was
being abolished or in decline? The rise of slave-like conditions in
Porfirian Mexico was linked to a number of factors, none of which
alone would be able to account sufficiently for this development:
( 1 ) A sharp increase in the demand for tropical goods, closely re-
lated to the development of railroads and other means of communica-
tions that linked plantation regions to markets.
( 2) The existence in central Mexico of a large reservoir of expro-
priated peasants uncommitted to haciendas and not absorbed by a
slowly developing industry.
( 3) The lack of industry and mining in southern Mexico facilitated
enslavement there as neither industrialists nor miners competed for
labor. As will be shown in the description of northern Mexico, such a
demand could considerably weaken the power of the hacendados over
their labor.
( 4) A strong government willing to help in the rise of this system
of neo-slavery. Increasing revenues from foreign investment and es-
pecially the building of railroads, had greatly strengthened the power
of the Dfaz government. It had set up a strong police force, the
rurales, as well as a relatively strong army capable of crushing local
peasant resistance and uprisings (though not, as was to be shown in
1910, capable of withstanding a revolution on a national scale). The
Dfaz government was blatantly linked to the enslavement of masses
of Yaquis and Mayas.
(5) Southern Mexico's geographic isolation facilitated government
control and made the emigration of workers difficult.
Central Mexico
The situation of the haciendas in central Mexico was in many re-
spects radically different from that which existed in the tropical South.
While the South mainly produced cash crops for export, the Center
relied mainly on the domestic market. And while there was a shortage
of labor in the South, there was a labor surplus in the Center. The
population had always been denser here and the massive expropria-
tions of Indian villages in the Porfirian period created a large class
of landless peasants. Only a minority of these could be absorbed by
the very limited industrial development taking place in central Mexico
between 1876 and 1910.
In examining the haciendas of the highlands two types must clearly
be differentiated: the majority, producing maize, wheat, and pulque,
and others, including the sugar cane plantations of Morelos, located
in the lower part of the highlands and geared to production of tropical
goods.
Although the demand for maize and wheat greatly rose during the
Dfaz period, production actually decreased, and Mexico had to rely
more and more on importation of these products. 78 The low cost of
labor discouraged mechanization. In 1902 Karl Kaerger calculated that
in Jalisco it cost 8 percent more to use farm machinery than hand
harvesting. 79 This tendency was further encouraged by difficulties in
securing credit for maize and wheat production, high tariffs protect-
ing inefficient Mexican hacendados from outside competition, and the
possibility of expanding production at practically no cost through the
expropriation of Indian lands.
Mechanization might have induced many haciendas to replace
tenantry and sharecropping arrangements by demesne. The lack of it
contributed to preventing any large-scale disappearance of such ar-
rangements.
During the Dfaz period real wages paid to hacienda laborers fell
sharply. If sharecropping was to remain as profitable as direct use of
hacienda land, the hacendados had to find a means to reduce the real
income of the sharecroppers as much as that of the agricultural work-
ers. The way the haciendas accomplished this is most clearly illus-
78. Com production fell from 2,730,620 tons in 1877 to 2,127,868 tons in 1907
and wheat production fell from 338,683 tons in 1877 to 292,611 tons in 1907. El
Colegio de Mexico, Estadzsticas econ6micas del Porfiriato, Fuerza de trabafo y
actividad econ6mica por sectores (Mexico, 1961 ), pp. 67, 69. At the same time the
population increased from 9.666,397 in 1877 to 14,890,030 in 1908, ibid., p. 25.
79 Kaerger, Landwirtschaft und Kolonisation, II, 650.
LABOR CONDITIONS ON HACffiNDAS
The North
A third pattern of hacienda labor emerged in the northern states
of the country. The North was similar to the South in that a large in-
crease in the demand for agricultural goods was coupled with a short-
age of labor. As in the South, forms of forced labor were much more
predominant in the North than in central Mexico prior to the Dfaz
period. Nevertheless, the North and the South took widely divergent
paths of development in the Porfirian period.
Long before the Spaniards conquered Mexico, the North had stood
apart from the evolution of the South and Center. Since most of the
land was not suited for agriculture, only small groups of agricultural-
ists lived in the North. The lack of a large sedentary Indian popula-
tion capable of serving as laborers limited Spanish expansion to the
North. The Spaniards could send settlers only into the mining regions
and their surroundings. The rest of the North remained very sparsely
populated. The existence of warlike nomadic Indian tribes also tended
to discourage extensive settlements in the North. These tendencies
were further strengthened by the loss of the most fertile lands in
northern Mexico to the United States in the Mexican-American War.
The results of these developments were contradictory. On the one
hand haciendas were much more dominant in the North up to the end
of the nineteenth century than in the South or the Center. There
were very few free Indian vil1ages to offset their influence. What vil-
lages there were in the North had been erected by a small number
of agricultural tribes, the largest one of them being the Yaquis in
Sonora. A few Indians from central Mexico, especially from Tlaxcala,
had been settled in villages by the Spaniards in the colonial period.
As in medieval Europe, where the lord's castle was the point of refuge
in times of attack, the hacienda offered protection to its inhabitants
from the attacks of hostile nomadic Indians. On some haciendas, such
as those of the Sanchez-Navarros in Coahuila, this fact tended to give
the hacendado nearly absolute power over his retainers who were
practically all tied to the hacienda by debt peonage and scarcely had
any possibility of leaving. 112 On other northern haciendas, as Fran~ois
Chevalier has shown, the hacendado's dependence on the armed force
of his peons against the Indians gave these retainers an added in-
fluence. By the end of the eighteenth century some resident peons on
northern haciendas had managed to secure a large measure of au-
tonomy from the hacienda. 93
94 This was the case in parts of Nuevo Leon (Gonzalez Navarro, El Porfiriato:
La vida social, p. 219) and Coahuila (Stanley R. Ross, Francisco Madero, Apostle
of Mexican Democracy [New York, 1955] pp. 3f). In 1904 the International Bureau
of the American Republics estimated that in northern Mexico in connection with
agricultural wages "labor is scarce, the influence of American customs is felt to
some extent, and wages are higher than in the central portion," International
Bureau of the American Republics, Mexico (Washington, 1904), p. 405. This
tendency comes out very clearly in an interview which an American cotton planter
of the State of Durango, Wallace C. Morrow, gave the Mexican Herald on Febru-
ary 7, 1906. He stressed that 10 percent of the cotton harvest in Durango might be
lost because of a lack of labor. "Then again there is an actual scarcity of labor in
the market," he declared. "Most of the old businesses have increased very con-
siderably thus demanding more laborers. But there are fewer laborers. Many
Mexicans from Durango have been attracted to the United States by the higher
wages paid there, and others have been induced to go to the various new mines
and to work upon the railway construction, in both of which latter places the wages
are more than doubled that which was paid to the peon a few years ago. In many
cases the cotton growers have offered double the wages they have been accustomed
to pay, without even then being able to secure a sufficient supply."
It is not surprising that the hacendados and the Porfirian authorities frequently
resisted such concessions to laborers and tended to exercise even more pressure on
laborers. In 1894 the governor of Tamaulipas suggested instituting forced labor
throughout the state. Such a law would have destroyed the myth of free labor in
Porfirian Mexico and was strongly resisted by national authorities. Gonzalez Navar-
ro, El Porfiriato: La vida social, p. 220.
LABOR CONDITIONS ON HACIENDAS 33
hacendado's share was usually between a third and a half of the
harvest. In the cottonfields of the Laguna region, sharecroppers paid
one-third of the cotton crop if they provided their own seed, animals
and agricultural implements. If they had to borrow them from the
hacienda, they either paid a rental fee of one peso per day or had to
deliver half of their crop to the hacendado. The hacienda managed
to increase somewhat its income from sharecroppers by forcing the
tercieros (sharecroppers paying only one-third of their crops to the
hacienda) to sell their own share of the cotton to the hacendado at
prices cheaper than those of the market. In addition, the share-
croppers were required to work hacienda lands when asked to do so
for three reales a day, far less than half what non-sharecroppers were
paid. 95
The need to attract new laborers led a number of hacendados, es-
pecially in Coahuila, to experiment with new paternalistic approaches
designed to provide their laborers with at least minimum of security.
On his hacienda in the Laguna region, Francisco Madero set up
schools, provided medical facilities for his workers, and in times of
famine or unemployment fed inhabitants of neighboring villages who
worked part-time on the hacienda (as well as some who did not).
The result of this was that Madero not only became extremely popular
but his hacienda became the most profitable in the Laguna region.
Many other hacendados began to follow his example. 96
On the cottonfields where most of the land was irrigated, the
sharecroppers could count on a regular yearly income. The situation
was different on the wheat- and corn-producing haciendas where most
of the land rented out to tenants or sharecroppers was not irrigated.
In Banamachi in the state of Sonora, the hacendados put animals,
seed and agricultural implements at the disposal of the sharecroppers
who kept two-thirds of their harvest. If they contributed all of this
themselves and only rented the land, all they had to pay was one-
fourth of the harvest. Conditions varied from hacienda to hacienda
and were dependent to a large degree on the quality of the land, the
amount of rainfall as well as on the neighborhood or distance from
the American border. The farther away any hacienda was from the
border or from industrial or mining areas, the harsher the share-
cropping conditions became and the more the hacendados seemed to
cling to methods of debt peonage. In Durango, for example, debt
peonage played a greater role than in the more northern states of
Sonora, Coahuila or Chihuahua.
In general, plots rented out in the North were larger than those
in the South, reflecting an abundance of land and a lack of labor. This
gave at least some tenants possibilities of earning more than a mere
subsistence, and of evolving into a kind of agricultural middle-class.
At the same time, the situation of many of the northern tenants was
precarious. Land in the North was not of the same quality as in the
Center and above all, the rainfall was more irregular. 97 A bad harvest
was to be expected every few years. Still, in central Mexico when such
a bad harvest occurred, the tenant either went deeper into debt with
the hacendado, or if he still had land of his own, returned to his vil-
lage and tried to eke out an existence the rest of the year; in the North
the peasant tended either to go to the mines or to look for work across
the border in the United States. This was not difficult since his agri-
cultural work only required three months of the year. Thus in the
North there emerged a new type of semi-industrial, semi-agricultural
laborer unknoWn in the Center and South of the country. 98
Many temporary laborers were found in the few highly specialized
export-oriented agricultural areas in the North, such as the cotton-
producing Laguna region in the state of Coahuila. But on many north-
em haciendas, primarily because of their concentration on cattle,
permanent labor seems to have played a greater role than in the rest
of Mexico. Cowboys and shepherds were needed throughout the year.
They formed a larger segment of the labor force of northern hacien-
das than in any other part of Mexico and their situation was better.
In the state of San Luis Potosi vaqueros received five pesos a month
plus food. In Chihuahua, their wages were seven to eight pesos plus
food in 1902. 99 By 1913 on the largest of the northern haciendas,
owned by the Terrazas family, their wages had risen to fifteen pesos
a month. 100 If a cowboy became a caporal, a foreman of which there
Southwest of the United States had lost their work and the American
authorities were shipping them back to the Mexican border. 104 By
1909 a cyclical crisis profoundly affected Mexico and thousands of
miners were laid off. In the same year the com harvest was one of the
worst northern Mexico had ever suffered. The result of these simul-
taneous disasters are very clearly summarized in a report sent in 1909
by the German consul in Chihuahua. "Price increases in basic food
stuffs," he wrote, "have greatly contributed to worsening the already
difficult economic situation. Maize rose to 7 pesos per hectoliter in-
stead of 3.5, beans now cost 15 pesos instead of 6 pesos per hecto-
liter.... Salaries were reduced to between 75 centavos and 1 peso
per day."1o5
A number of questions concerning labor conditions on northern
Mexican haciendas are not easily answered. How extensive and effec-
tive was debt peonage? How large a part of the labor force of north-
em Mexican haciendas was temporary and how much of it was
permanent?. Were there possibilities of upward mobility for these
laborers? While some information exists about debt peonage in the
South and Center of Mexico, there is very little information about it
in the North. The proximity of the United States where peons could
flee, 106 as well as the competition from newly developing industries
suggest, as has been noted, that it was much more difficult to tie
laborers to the haciendas by coercion in the North than in any other
104. R. L. Sandels, "Silvestre Terrazas, the Press and the Origins of the Mexi-
can Revolution in Chihuahua," Ph.D. Diss., University of Oregon, 1967, "P 162.
105. Deutsches Zentralarchiv Potsdam, AA II, Nr. 4491. Consul in Chihuahua
to Biilow, October 5, 1909. A similar situation was described by the German Con-
sul in Colima, Deutsches Zentralarchiv in Potsdam, Nr. 4492, Consul in Colima
to Biilow, October 21, 1908 and by the Consul in Guadalajara, Deutsches Zen-
tralarchiv Potsdam AA II, Nr. 4494 Consul in Guadalajara to Biilow, November 6,
1906.
106. In the latter years of the Porfiriato many observers were registering an
ever increasing labor shortage in northern Mexico due to emigration to the United
States. An agricultural expert wrote in 1911 that
El jornal exiguo en muchfsimas regiones del pals seiiala la causa de escasez
de brazos, pues los nadonales, quiza por efecto mismo de las exigencias de
Ia vida, tienden a emigrar en busca de trabajo mas bien remunerado,
formandose asf una ola emigratoria alarmante, muy especialmente hacia
la vecina del Norte. En esta Naci6n, el jornalero obtiene remuneraci6n
mas equitativa y condiciones de vida y alimentaci6n mas alagadoras, sin
tener que sufrir las expoltaciones inmoderadas por parte de los administra-
dores de las fincas y por no pocos propietarios, que casi convierten al infeliz
peon en un verdadero esclavo. Las infamantes tiendas de raya, los pres-
tamos, etc., etc., hacen del jornalero, una victima de los terratenientes.
(Gustavo Duran, "lmportancia de la agricultura y del franccionamiento de tierras,"
in Jesus Silva Herzog, La cuesti6n de la tierra, I, 190.)
LABOR CONDITIONS ON HACmNDAS 37
part of Mexico. This hypothesis is strengthened by the fact that legis-
lation concerning peonage was different in the northern Mexican states
from that in the rest of the country. The state governments of Nuevo
Le6n and Sonora established that a peon's debt to his employer could
not legally surpass his salary for three months. 107 Such legislation rep-
resented not only a recognition of the increased mobility of agricul-
tural workers it also resulted from pressures exerted by industrialists
and mineowners whose growing power the hacendados were com-
pelled to accommodate. Hacienda peons were the inevitable source of
a large part of the labor force working on railway construction and
in mines and industries. Since the Diaz government as well as the
hacendados wanted foreign investments, they could not very well
oppose the recruitment of laborers from their haciendas. But the
hacendados did want some compensation for their loss. While the
industrialists and miners were willing to pay some compensation they
sought to keep it low enough to ensure its recovery through forcing
the former agricultural laborers in their employ to repay whatever
sums had been spent to hire them.
On the whole, laborers on northern Mexican haciendas possessed
a far greater degree of upward mobility than their counterparts in
the South and Center. Since there was one caporal for every seven
or eight cowboys, it was not all too difficult for a cowboy who stayed
on a ranch for a longer period of time to be promoted. Tenants who
worked their lands during three or four months of the year could fre-
quently make money on the side either by working in mines or across
the border in the United States. Many of them were able to save
enough to invest in buying ranches or setting up small stores. For many
northern laborers, however, upward mobility was as frequently
matched by downward mobility. While the indebted laborers of the
South were protected by the fact that they represented an investment
which the hacendado did not want to lose, there was no such pro-
tection for the free laborers of the North. The traditional patterns of
paternalism which were predominant in the Center as well as in the
South appear to have been much less common in the N orth. 108
107. Gonzalez Navarro, El Porfiriato: La vida social, p. 220. In Sonora in 1881
debts were limited to three month wages, but two years later the law was changed
and allowed peons to accumulate debts equal to six months wages. In Sinaloa and
Chihuahua the state governors attempted to restrict the debts peons could accumu-
late, ibid. These laws represented a return to similar legislations enacted by the
Spanish colonial authorities: see, Silvio Zavala, "Los origenes coloniales del peonaje
en Mexico," in Estudios Indianos (Madrid, 1935).
108. These descriptions of labor conditions on Porfirian haciendas are to a large
degree based on Kaerger's report. A survey carried out about fifteen years earlier
and whose results are affixed to an American consular report on labor conditions
HAHR I FEBRUARY FRIEDRICH KATZ
Conclusions
Several conclusions can be drawn from all of these developments.
No uniform pattern can be discerned in the development of debt
peonage in the Porfirian era in Mexico. Under different circumstances
similar causes produced contrary effects. Increasing demand for agri-
cultural products linked to large-scale foreign investment produced a
sharp increase in debt peonage in Mexico's Southeast. Forms of debt
peonage there became more and more similar to overt slavery. In the
North the same causes produced exactly the opposite result, the weak-
ening and frequently the disappearance of debt peonage. The reasons
for these discrepancies have already been discussed. Geographical
isolation and the lack of industry favored an increase of debt peonage
in the South, while the proximity of the American border and the in-
creasing demand for labor by mines and industry tended to weaken
debt peonage in the North. In the Center of Mexico developments are
much more difficult to assess since tendencies toward weakening and
strengthening debt peonage operated at the same time.
in Mexico ("Resources of Mexico," Reports from the Consuls of the United States,
XIX, [April-September, 1886] Washington, 1886; pp. 494-568.) bear out Kaerger's
observations. It is not clear, whether the State Department printed a Mexican
enquiry or whether American authorities had carried out or commissioned this
survey. The three most relevant questions the survey asked concerned: ( 1) wages
of agricultural labor, ( 2) conditions under which contracts for agricultural labor
are made, ( 3) supply of labor. The localities surveyed comprise only a small part
of the country. The survey is weakest for the northern border states since there is
no data at all from Baja California, Sonora and Chihuahua and only two localities
in Coahuila were examined.
Of eight localities in southern Mexico, mainly located in Chiapas and Tabasco,
all reported a scarcity of labor. Six of the eight mention large debts while two
mention yearly contracts where advances are given at the beginning of the year.
The statements accompanying this data are even more revealing. "No proprietor
of this locality will accept any laborer born here who does not have a debt against
him," wrote the agent from Pichucalco ( p. 534). "Contracts are made before the
civil judge, when the servant owes less than 100 pesos; if he owes more than 100
pesos, they are made before the judge of the court of first instance. The reason for
this is because in the State of Chiapas servitude still exists, the remains, unfortu-
nately, of slavery in the past" reported the agent from Catazaja, District of Palen-
que, Chiapas ( p. 537). The agent in Jonuta in the State of Tabasco wrote: "Field
hands are under a sort of bondage, constituted by a debt of $300, $400, $5oo, or
even more, which each servant owes, and, by the law which governs these con-
tracts and permits the forced confinement of the servant, he who for just cause
wishes to chal).ge master shall have three day's time for $100 he owes given him
to find one who will pay his indebtedness" ( p. 557).
In Central Mexico of thirty-one localities surveyed, fifteen reported sufficient
laborers and sixteen a scarcity of available labor. While most localities in Michoa-
LABOR CONDITIONS ON HACIENDAS 39
If there is one linear tendency which can be documented through-
out Mexican history from 1427 to 1910 it is the constant expansion of
private property at the cost of communal property. The first recorded
instance we have of this expansion was in 1427, when the armies of
the triple Alliance, Tenochtitlan, Texcoco and Tlacopan, conquered
Atzcatpotzalco. At that time, Aztec chronicles recorded that the war-
riors who had displayed their courage by fighting against Atzcapotzalco
were rewarded with large grants of conquered land, while the com-
mon people who had been too cowardly to fight received practically
nothing. 109
During the Aztec and Spanish colonial periods, this expansion was
gradual. It was resisted both by the Aztec and by the Spanish states
both of which feared that the power of the landowners could get out
of hand. With the advent of Independence, Mexico's landowners ac-
quired increasing political dominance over the state. After 1876 the
expansion of their holdings reached a climax. Indian communal vil-
lages were all but wiped out. Was this expansion of land and power
paralleled by a similar expansion in forms of forced labor? Had the
climactic development of large haciendas in the Porfirian period
created a country composed of a few landowners, and their police-
men and retainers on the one hand and huge armies of debt peons on
can, Mexico, Jalisco, Queretaro and Morelos reported an adequate supply of labor,
scarcity of labor was reported in the semi-tropical regions of Veracruz and Guer-
rero and from the States of Tlaxcala and Oaxaca where there was still a very great
concentration of communal Indian villages. It should not be forgotten that at the
time this report was written, a large part of the communal lands had not yet been
expropriated, so that many villagers felt no need to work on the haciendas.
There is no absolute correlation between yearly contracts implying peonage
and scarcity of labor, though such a tendency emerges. Of twenty-nine localities
where data on labor contracts was available, eleven mentioned debts or yearly
contracts while eighteen reported free labor or sharecropping. Of the eleven
localities where some form of debt peonage existed, eight mentioned a scarcity of
labor while three reported that sufficient laborers were available. Of those report-
ing free labor conditions eight mentioned a scarcity of labor while eleven reported
sufficient laborers available. Sharecropping is always linked in these reports to a
sufficient supply of laborers.
In the North, of thirteen localities reporting, three stressed a scarcity of labor,
while ten mentioned that sufficient laborers were available, only three mentioned
debts or yearly contracts, while ten stated that laborers were free. Of the latter,
nine were localities with a sufficient labor supply, and one reported a scarcity of
labor. Of the three localities reporting some kind of peonage, two stressed the
scarcity of available labor. It must be stressed that this report was made in 1885
and that from then until 1910 an enormous increase in the demand for labor in
Northern Mexico took place.
109. Friedrich Katz, Ancient American Civilisations (London, 1972), pp. 146-
147.
HAHR I FEBRUARY I FRIEDRICH KATZ
the other? This constitutes one of the most difficult and unresolved
problems of Mexican history.
There is no evidence of any linear correlation between the expan-
sion of land-holding on the one hand and an increase in the use of
forced labor on the other as far as central Mexico was concerned. In
the more peripheral regions of the North and South, the evolution of
labor arrangements was different. In these regions a kind of correla-
tion does seem to have existed, though in the North it only lasted
until 1870.
In central Mexico, two phenomena, closely related but not iden-
tical, must be taken into account: changes in the number of laborers
residing permanently on the hacienda, and changes in the amount of
forced labor, including debt peonage among other forms. Nearly all
the haciendas required two types of laborers. Permanent residents were
needed throughout the year and temporary laborers required on a
seasonal basis. The ratio between both groups depended on two sets
of factors:
(a) Ecological and economic determinants such as the type of
production prevailing on an hacienda (cattle ranches, for example
required more permanent laborers than predominantly wheat- or com-
producing haciendas), the quality of its lands (most haciendas tended
to cultivate good lands for themselves, leaving marginal lands to ten-
ants or sharecroppers), and the proximity of markets;
(b) The availability of temporary labor, which depended on sev-
eral variables like demographic factors or the land available to com-
munal villages (if villages lacked sufficient lands an ever increasing
number of inhabitants had no choice but to work on the hacienda).
Attempts by the state to control allocation of temporary labor also
pia yed a role.
Up to the middle of the seventeenth century, there was a scarcity
of freely available temporary labor to work on Spanish estates. This
labor scarcity was due in part to the enormous decline in the Indian
population after the Spanish Conquest, in part to the fact that until
mid-century most Indian villages still had sufficient lands at their dis-
posal. The villagers thus had few economic incentives to work on
Spanish estates. Meanwhile, the Spanish administration, through such
institutions as the repartimiento, did its utmost to control the alloca-
tion of Indian labor. Large numbers of permanent resident peons thus
offered two advantages: a more stable work force and greater control,
independent of crown officials. It is therefore not surprising that
Woodrow Borah found that during the seventeenth century, "debt
LABOR CONDITIONS ON HACIENDAS
peonage had become the major source of labor" for Spanish estates.l1
The sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries were also periods when
forms of forced labor directed towards the inhabitants of communal
villages reached their peak. 111
In the eighteenth century, the situation changed again. The slow
rise of the Indian population, increasing shortages of land owned by
communal villages (due to confiscation by haciendas as well as be-
cause of an increment of the population), the practical end of efforts
by the Spanish crown to allocate labor through the repartimiento, the
appearance of large groups of mestizos having no claim to communal
lands, all tended to increase the availability of temporary labor. The
result was a tendency by the end of the eighteenth century for the
haciendas in central Mexico not to increase the number of permanent
resident laborers and to rely less on forms of forced labor such as
debt peonage. All evidence we have up to now for the eighteenth
century confirms these trends.
During the Porfiriato, a new situation arose. The expropriation of
communal villages brought about two contradictory tendencies. On
the one hand, cheap temporary labor became more readily available
than ever before. This made it economically less and less necessary
for the hacendados in central Mexico to rely on forced labor. On the
other hand, as the haciendas acquired more and more land, much of
it of mediocre quality, they preferred not to work it themselves but
to shift the risk to sharecroppers and tenants. The condition of these
occupants was so precarious that many of them, for reasons described
above, inevitably incurred debts with the hacienda which they could
not repay.
The relative strength of these two tendencies (less need for debt
peons, but more laborers than ever dependent upon the hacienda) is
very difficult to assess, given the present state of research on rural
Mexico in the Porfiriato.
Social stratification and differentiation on haciendas was much
110. Woodrow Borah, New Spain's Century C{f Depression (Berkeley, 1951),
P 39
111. The official end of the repartimiento in 1633 at first did not weaken but
rather strengthened debt peonage as hacendados tried to compensate for the loss
of repartimiento labor by settling more and more resident peons on their estates.
(Borah, New Spain's Century of Depression, [Berkeley, 1951], pp. 40-41. Silvio
Zavala, "Los origenes" p. 328). For a tirrie the Spanish state tried to limit debt
peonage by such measures as setting a ceiling (generally four month wages) on the
debt an Indian peon could accumulate. Mestizos, negroes and mulattoes were ex-
cluded from this lef!islation. These measures do not seem to have been strongly
enforced and somewhat later Spanish viceroys officially allowed Indian peons to
accumulate much higher debts. (Silvio Zavala, "Los origenes.")
42 HAHR I FEBRUARY I FRIEDRICH KATZ
prisonments on haciendas, which are not limited to the tropical zones of the South.
When John Kenneth Turner's famous book Barbarous Mexico was published in
1910, the Dfaz press and government as well as the hacendados sharply denied his
allegations. About fifteen years later Ernest Gruening traveled through the same
region which Turner had visited before him. He specifi~ally confirmed TnrnP-r's
judgments and added, "In 1923 I traveled through those regions. Even the
Yucatecan hacendados denied little, although at the time with a militantly revolu-
tionary governor, Felipe Carillo Puerto, in the saddle, recollections of that nature
were painful. It was on the other fellow's hacienda that those things happened.
'We treated our peons very much better than the rest.' The hacendados were
unanimous on that point.'' (Ernest Gruening, Mexico and its Heritage [New York,
1940], p. 138.)
44 HAHR I FEBRUARY I FRIEDRICH KATZ
but it meant getting land on much more onerous terms than before.
This is very clearly shown by the evolution on the hacienda of Celaya,
where medieros al rajar were gradually replaced by medieros al
quinto.U 3 For the contract workers, many of whom were former land-
owners, the situation had worsened even more drastically.
(b) Decrease in the value of real wages on the hacienda. While
nominal wages remained nearly constant, prices during the Porfiriato
increased by at least 30 percent.
(c) The loss of freedom of movement by a large part of this group,
especially in southeastern Mexico, due to increased debt peonage.
Looking at these three groups, it is significant that the majority
of the first group, an important part of the second, but only a small
part of the third, were people who had resided on haciendas prior to
the Diaz period. A general trend in this period seems to have been
that the relative conditions of the pre-Diaz acasillados became better
in relation to former communal villagers.
The most complicated question to be answered is how these dif-
ferent experiences affected the behavior of each group during the
Mexican Revolution of 1910. Very little concrete research has been
done to answer this question. There is as yet no detailed stUdy of the
social composition of Mexican revolutionary armies, nor are there
many local studies describing who joined the armies and why. Con-
clusions can only be drawn from the regional distribution of revolu-
tionary activity and from evidence available in the few local studies
that have been carried out.
No direct correlation exists between the degree of exploitation in
the Diaz era and participation in the Mexican revolutionary move-
ment. The southern states of Mexico, Oaxaca, Chiapas, Tabasco,
Yucatan where forced labor and slavery were most predominant
either took very little part in the revolution, or as in Yucatan, joined
the revolutionary tide quite late. While this may seem surprising at
first, it is quite understandable. Common action by laborers on south-
ern haciendas was hampered by the wide diversity of their origins.
Sonoran Yaquis, central Mexican deportees and Mayan lab9rers worked
side by side on an henequen hacienda. This frequently led to m~tual
rivalries and conflicts which the hacienda was quick to exploit. An-
other important fact was that southern haciendas relied much less than
113. For the tenants and sharecroppers on the Hacienda de Hueyapan between
1900 and 1910 the terms of tenantry became harsher and were enforced with in-
creasing stringency. Many tenants were forced to become sharecroppers which
often meant a deterioration of their situation. Couturier, "Hacienda de Hueyap{m."
LABOR CONDITIONS ON HACIENDAS 45
haciendas in other parts of the country on national and state repres-
sive forces and generally had their own police apparatus. Until the
revolutionary armies penetrated their territories these estates were not
affected by the Revolution. If to all this one adds the geographical
isolation of Mexico's South and the difficulty the laborers had in ob-
taining news of what was happening in the rest of Mexico, it is not
difficult to understand why revolutionary movements either did not
occur or occurred very late.
There are also indications that the majority of acasillados never
joined the Revolution. On the Hacienda of Santa Ana in the heart of
the Zapatista territory in Morelos, the acasillados residing on the
casco of the hacienda did not join the Revolution and seem to have
resisted agrarian reform up to 1938. Paul Friedrich describes a simi-
lar attitude on the part of the acasillados of the Hacienda of Cantabria
in Michoacan.l1 4 While the reasons for this require more study, certain
factors can be cited. Rivalry between the acasillados of an hacienda
and the residents of neighboring free villages had an old tradition in
Mexico, and probably continued on the hacienda even after the com-
munal villagers had lost most of their lands. The relative security which
the acasillados enjoyed as well as the paternalism of the hacendado
may have enhanced their sense of superiority, reinforcing their ties
to the hacienda. This attitude did not extend to all acasillados. In
Yucatan after 1917 many of them participated very actively in agrarian
movements and this may have been the case in many other parts of
Mexico. This is another problem that requires more research.
In the Center of Mexico it was essentially the former owners of
communal lands, now expropriated and working as tenant share-
croppers, and temporary laborers on haciendas who constituted the
bulk of the membership of the revolutionary armies. For them the
revolution had the clear claim of restoring their lands.
In the North this cannot be said. Prior to the Porfiriato there had
been very few Indian villages and the mass of laborers on northern
haciendas were not expropriated peons. The mass of the revolutionary
armies of the North seems to have been composed of semi-agricultural,
semi-industrial workers, as well as cowboys and shepherds. Much more
research is required to determine the factors which drove them to
Revolution. Certainly the inse.curity of their situation, especially in the
case of the agricultural-industrial workers must have played an im-
portant role. In the state of Chihuahua for instance, on the eve of the
Revolution, three crises coincided at one and the same time. A large